XBMC for Android Beta 2 APK Released

Android received some pretty exciting media player news when it was announced that XBMC had made it to the platform. Initially, there were quite a few issues with the nightlies coming out. However, it has been a few months, and the developers have made some great strides.

There are still some issues to work out, but Beta 2 has just been released, and it brings a lot to the table. XDA Senior Member kemonine96 updated the XBMC thread to reflect the changes, and there have been a lot of them. Some of the highlights:

All builds are now built for 2.3.x (GingerBread) or higher devices. ARM ONLY. I will not be releasing MIPS or x86 builds. Google TV devices are UNSUPPORTED. I do not know if / when the XBMC dev’s will be supporting Google TV. Working Add-Ons 1Channel — Developer PM’d me and the choppyness is fixed in latest version (url in add-ons links below) Anarcintosh’s Icefilms BBC iPlayer 2 dpstream Freecable fs.ua FTP Sources Icefilms Navi-X PBS Samba Sources Shared Library: http://forum.xda-developers.com/show…5&postcount=57 TED Talks plugin works great. The Trailers plugin Tuxbox TVCatchup Tvlinks Broken Add-Ons Bluecop’s Amazon (crashes trying to unload librtmp.so — symbol not found) Bluecop’s Hulu MLBMC: Major League Baseball Media Center myvideo.de Trakt.tv stable. The version on github works on Windows, can anyone validate the version from git works on Android? TuneInRadio WebDav HTTPS

Additionally, there are a myriad of bug fixes, stability improvements, minor tweaks, and other general fixes. There are still many issues, but they’re being tackled as quickly as possible. The worst problems include laggy or non-functioning 720p and 1080p video, high battery drain, high resource usage, touch screen sensitivity issues, and screen flickering.

As before, there are two builds to choose from: NEON and Non-NEON builds. Non-NEON build are for Tegra 2 devices and other chipsets lacking support for the ARM NEON instruction set only, while the NEON builds have a much long compatibility list. There is extensive work being done on both variants. Not only is beta 3 already being prepared for release, but kemonine96 is also releasing a new December nightly very soon. If you’ve been using an older version of XBMC, this is an excellent opportunity to update it and run a better version.